Education Week Feature

July 24, 2017

Education Week Feature

"Understanding the Council of Fifty and Its Minutes"

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BYU Studies Staff

This year BYU Studies is again sponsoring classes at Campus Education Week, August 21–25, 2017, on BYU campus in Provo, Utah. Whether or not you are able to attend, we invite you to read the articles on which the presentations will be based.

Joseph Smith organized the Council of Fifty, a civic body of leading Mormon men as well as a few non-Mormons, in March 1844 in Nauvoo, Illinois. William Clayton took minutes of the Nauvoo meetings. Minutes of the Council of Fifty are now published in full by The Joseph Smith Papers project. These minutes preserve teachings and statements of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young on government and related topics and convey the intensity of feelings about the injustices the Saints had suffered in Missouri and Illinois. This council became Joseph Smith's forum of choice for managing his presidential campaign and his goal of finding a way that the Saints could safely exercise their religion.

Below is a list of BYU Studies authors who are presenting classes independently.

Jared W. Ludlow

Classes:

"Testimony and the Four R's of the Holy Spirit (Youth)"—138–144 RB, Monday, Aug. 21, 1:50

"The Importance of Jerusalem in Religious History and in the Future"—3220–3224 WSC, Tue.–Fri., Aug. 22–25, 1:50

"The Apocrypha—What's in It and Where Did It Come From?"—3220–3224 WSC, Tue.–Fri., Aug. 22–25, 3:10